Today we face a climate of ever increasing misdirection by popular media. This site, along with others, aims to reveal the reality of America and the loss of fact inherent to the over riding theme of our current political and social confusion: Purposeful deception.

Wednesday, February 1, 2012

Corporations Have No Use for Borders

What happened to Canada?
It used to be the country we would flee to if life in the United States
became unpalatable. No nuclear weapons. No huge military-industrial complex.
Universal health care. Funding for the arts. A good record on the environment.

But that was the old Canada.
I was in Montreal
on Friday and Saturday and saw the familiar and disturbing tentacles of the
security and surveillance state. Canada
has withdrawn from the Kyoto Accords so it can dig up the Alberta tar sands in
an orgy of environmental degradation. It carried out the largest mass
arrests of demonstrators in Canadian history at 2010’s G-8 and G-20
meetings, rounding up more than 1,000 people. It sends undercover police into
indigenous communities and activist groups and is handing out stiff prison
terms to dissenters. And Canada’s
Prime Minister Stephen Harper is a diminished version of George W. Bush. He
champions the rabid right wing in Israel, bows to the whims of global
financiers and is a Christian fundamentalist.

The voices of dissent sound
like our own. And the forms of persecution are familiar. This is not an
accident. We are fighting the same corporate leviathan.

“I want to tell you that I
was arrested because I am seen as a threat,” Canadian activist Leah Henderson wrote
to fellow dissidents before being sent to Vanier prison in Milton, Ontario, to
serve a 10-month sentence. “I want to tell you that you might be too. I want to
tell you that this is something we need to prepare for. I want to tell you that
the risk of incarceration alone should not determine our organizing.”

“My skills and experience—as
a facilitator, as a trainer, as a legal professional and as someone linking
different communities and movements—were all targeted in this case, with the
state trying to depict me as a ‘brainwasher’ and as a mastermind of mayhem,
violence and destruction,” she went on. “During the week of the G8 & G20
summits, the police targeted legal observers, street medics and independent
media. It is clear that the skills that make us strong, the alternatives that
reduce our reliance on their systems and prefigure a new world, are the very
things that they are most afraid of.”

The decay of Canada
illustrates two things. Corporate power is global, and resistance to it cannot
be restricted by national boundaries. Corporations have no regard for
nation-states. They assert their power to exploit the land and the people
everywhere. They play worker off of worker and nation off of nation. They
control the political elites in Ottawa as they
do in London, Paris
and Washington.
This, I suspect, is why the tactics to crush the Occupy movement around the
globe have an eerie similarity—infiltrations, surveillance, the denial of
public assembly, physical attempts to eradicate encampments, the use of
propaganda and the press to demonize the movement, new draconian laws stripping
citizens of basic rights, and increasingly harsh terms of incarceration.

Our solidarity should be
with activists who march on Tahrir
Square in Cairo or
set upencampamentos in Madrid.
These are our true compatriots. The more we shed ourselves of national identity
in this fight, the more we grasp that our true allies may not speak our
language or embrace our religious and cultural traditions, the more powerful we
will become.

Those who seek to discredit
this movement employ the language of nationalism and attempt to make us fearful
of the other. Wave the flag. Sing the national anthem. Swell with national
hubris. Be vigilant of the hidden terrorist. Canada’s Minister of Natural
Resources Joe Oliver, responding to the growing opposition to the Keystone XL
and the Northern Gateway pipelines,
wrote in an open letter that “environmental and other radical groups” were
trying to “hijack our regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological
agenda.” He accused pipeline opponents of receiving funding from foreign
special interest groups and said that “if all other avenues have failed, they
will take a quintessential American approach: sue everyone and anyone to delay
the project even further.”

No matter that in both Canada and the United States suing the government
to seek redress is the right of every citizen. No matter that the opposition to
the Keystone XL and Northern Gateway pipelines has its roots in Canada. No
matter that the effort by citizens in the U.S.
and in Canada
to fight climate change is about self-preservation. The minister, in the pocket
of the fossil fuel industry like the energy czars in most of the other
industrialized nations, seeks to pit “loyal” Canadians against “disloyal”
Canadians. Those with whom we will build this movement of resistance will not
in some cases be our own. They may speak Arabic, pray five times a day toward
Mecca and be holding off the police thugs in the center of Cairo. Or they may
be generously pierced and tattooed and speak Danish or they may be
Mandarin-speaking workers battling China’s totalitarian capitalism.
These are differences that make no difference.

“My country right or wrong,”
G.K. Chesterton once wrote, is on the same level as “My mother, drunk or
sober.”

Our most dangerous
opponents, in fact, look and speak like us. They hijack familiar and comforting
iconography and slogans to paint themselves as true patriots. They claim to
love Jesus. But they cynically serve the function a native bureaucracy serves
for any foreign colonizer. The British and the French, and earlier the Romans,
were masters of this game. They recruited local quislings to carry out policies
and repression that were determined in London or
Paris or Rome.
Popular anger was vented against these personages, and native group vied with
native group in battles for scraps of influence. And when one native ruler was
overthrown or, more rarely, voted out of power, these imperial machines
recruited a new face. The actual centers of power did not change. The pillage
continued. Global financiers are the new colonizers. They make the rules. They
pull the strings. They offer the illusion of choice in our carnivals of
political theater. But corporate power remains constant and unimpeded. Barack
Obama serves the same role Herod did in imperial Rome.

This is why the Occupy Wall
Street movement is important. It targets the center of power—global financial
institutions. It deflects attention from the empty posturing in the legislative
and executive offices in Washington or London or Paris.
The Occupy movement reminds us that until the corporate superstructure is
dismantled it does not matter which member of the native elite is elected or
anointed to rule. The Canadian prime minister is as much a servant of corporate
power as the American president. And replacing either will not alter corporate
domination. As the corporate mechanisms of control become apparent to wider
segments of the population, discontent will grow further. So will the force employed
by our corporate overlords. It will be a long road for us. But we are not
alone. There are struggles and brush fires everywhere. Leah Henderson is not
only right. She is my compatriot.

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